


An Unexpected Unsung Hero

by YamiTami



Category: Hogan's Heroes
Genre: Gen, Universe Alteration
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiTami/pseuds/YamiTami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A pilot has been shot down over Germany but it seems he's been there before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rec Sounds like Wreck

The fuselage was a sieve and petrol rained down upon the countryside. Rec found himself thinking of a borrowed song as every gauge ticked down to critical. _Off we go into the wild blue yonder_ , he thought with bitter sarcasm as his plane roared through the inky night. Thick clouds blotted out the moon and the only light came from midair explosions. Still, the rhythm of it calmed him and helped him stay focused on his white-knuckled grip on the stick. The song in his head almost drowned out the whistle of the wind and the screaming of the kid in the backseat. The sky full of flak and the cold, relentless, unforgiving ground flipped and danced so fast that he couldn’t track either.

For the sake of looking at something that wasn’t spinning wildly he focused on the panel. The altimeter dropped like a stone. Attitude control spun in time with the rolling scenery. The fuel gauge said that they had passed trouble and were well into disaster. The Gs were edging into forces that would black them out. They were spiraling closer and closer to a hard landing in the dirt.

The kid was still screaming. The canopy wouldn’t disengage. They couldn’t bail out.

Once he left his old life behind Rec had to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t, in fact, the best flier. He was actually mediocre at best. But the thing about screwing up in so many ways is that he had a lot of practice in getting himself out of trouble that better fliers never even saw coming because they’d never screwed up before. He watched a kid who flew better than he could even dream fly straight and beautiful—right into a bridge.

Most of the time he was annoyed that his call sign was Rec, pulling double duty as being short for recovery and sounding like wreck. But there are no atheists in foxholes nor are they in perforated metal coffins falling through a tumbling sky, and as Rec wrenched the stick and executed a maneuver that would make any ace groan at the inelegance he thanked a god he didn’t really believe in for all those mishaps in his past. It wasn’t pretty and it was anything but smooth but Rec managed to get the bird level and kill enough speed to give them a sliver of a chance. There were trees, trees, and more trees, with one solitary plot of tilled land that might save them. Rec let it all hang out, all the flaps and the landing gear which was, mercifully, still functioning, and the drag slowed them down further. The kid had graduated from wordless noise to repeating ‘you’re crazy’ like a mantra at machinegun speeds. It became the metronome for the song in Rec’s head as he yanked the nose up and they plowed into the field.

Rec blacked out somewhere after impact but it couldn’t have been for long as the dust was still settling when he came to. The kid was silent and Rec was scared that he’d broken the boy’s neck, but then hysterical laughter bubbled up from the back seat and Rec breathed out a very unsteady relieved sigh. His nerves were still singing from the adrenaline and terror but he refused to give in to the urge to join his co-pilot in breaking down completely. Instead he went to work on the stuck canopy which had by some miracle loosened in the crash. Once he got it off and was outside the craft he could see how the flak had slaked off a good portion around the latch and how that bent metal had been ripped away by something or other while they were skidding across some poor farmer’s crops. The hull was peeled away like an orange.

The kid was still sitting in the twisted corpse of the fighter and he was still laughing uncontrollably. He fought, helplessly, with his harness, and was quickly getting nowhere. He looked up and stared at Rec pleadingly, fear and hope mixed in equal parts, and reached out to the man standing outside the downed bird.

Rec could admit, sometimes, that he was a self-serving bastard. He had no honor and he had no shame but he was alive where people of stronger conviction wouldn’t be if they’d been through what he’d been through. The rush was fading enough for him to realize that they’d gone from the frying pan to the firing squad. Rec doubted that Germany was honoring the Geneva Convention in the first place, but he had a lot more to lose than some dumb kid from the sticks who moaned about being stuck flying backseat to ‘The Old Man’ and who proceeded to lose his head when the bullets hit. Rec couldn’t even remember the fool’s name. He’d move faster without the kid and would have a better chance of survival.

With legs stable as marmalade Rec climbed up on the wing and helped the kid out of his harness. Maybe he had a little honor and a little shame after all.

In any case, focusing on keeping the kid moving helped. Rec was responsible for someone else and that meant that he wasn’t allowed to break down as he so desperately wanted to. When the kid stumbled Rec would haul him up and they kept moving. At the edge of the field was a stand of thick trees and they skirted it as Rec tried to get his bearings. With no moon or stars as reference he couldn’t tell if he was moving towards England or deeper into Germany. All he knew is that they had to keep moving. There would be patrols all over the area all too soon and even if they were moving in the wrong direction it had to be better than hanging around the crash site.

The kid was almost calmed down and Rec was still lost when they came to a small road leading into the woods. They also came to a rifle. Rec had his hands up and his eyes on the barrel in a flash and it took him a minute to register the man holding the gun. Maybe a decade Rec’s senior and well weathered—the farmer whose field they just destroyed, no doubt. It took another minute for Rec to see the young teenage girl hiding behind the man behind the gun.

A gun which was being lowered. The farmer gulped and the girl clutched his arm and in a small, thin voice she managed one word in English.

“Friend.”

The old man motioned for the two fliers to fall in step. Numbly, Rec and the kid followed the pair back to their quaint little house. Once there the two fliers sat, numbly, at the kitchen table while the family discussed what to do with them. The old man and young girl had been joined by the man’s son and daughter, the daughter being the young girl’s mother. They each had a different idea about what to do with their Allied guests but there were two things that all of them had in common. They were all scared and they went back and forth on what to do but in the end they agreed that they would not be handing the fliers over to the Gestapo. The kid was busy sweating through his flight suit as, naturally, all the arguing was being done in German and he didn’t speak a word of it. Rec didn’t want to let on to _anyone_ that he could understand every word so he told the kid to calm down and then stared stonily at the wall as all the things that could happen to him played through his head.

That lasted until the son, the designated lookout, ran into the kitchen in a panic because a Gestapo patrol was on the way down their road. While the kid didn’t understand German he did know that word and in a flash he was on his feet. He looked like he wanted to run but didn’t know which way to go, like a squirrel stalled in front of an oncoming car. Rec just drew up into himself, hunched shoulders and crossed arms.

The family still didn’t want to turn them over. They were clearly terrified of what the Gestapo would do to them but they didn’t want to turn these Allied soldiers over to their own countrymen. It had been years since Rec had stepped foot on this soil, years spent wondering if he’d made the right decision in leaving. He supposed he had it now, if four people would risk their lives to help the enemy because their own country was a far greater threat.

What a way to come home.

The family was frantic trying to come up with a possible escape route or hiding place for the two downed fliers. There was no clean exit. Rec and the kid would have to make a run for it and hope for the best. The kid was fit and would probably be able to outrun them, but he had none of the finesse required to survive on the run and in hiding through enemy territory. Rec had that knowledge but he was no longer a young man. He barely passed the physical that put him back in the air. He knew what type of person the black uniform attracted. He knew they’d shoot first.

“Tell them you captured us.”

He said it in English so the reaction was confusion on the part of the family and outrage on the part of the kid. Rec wasn’t typically a very physical person but he could make an exception; he grabbed the kid’s shirt and hauled him back into the chair.

“Look, there is no possibility of getting away from the Gestapo. We will have a better chance of survival if we—“

Rage flashed in the young boy’s eyes. “We have to _try!_ To hell with you, old geezer, I’d rather go down fighting!”

“And them?” Rec hissed, jerking his head towards the four silent locals watching the proceedings with wide eyes. “They were trying to help us. If we run then the Gestapo will know that and this family will be punished.”

“Bullshit, they were trying to help us! Damn Krauts are the ones who turned us in.”

“No, they didn’t.”

“How in the hell would you—“

“ _Tell them you captured us_.” Rec repeated, but this time in his native tongue. It had been years since German words had passed his lips. The kid gaped, as did half the family, but the old man kept his wits about him.

“ _Grab the shotgun, son. **Now!** Greta, meet the Gestapo at the door and tell them that we caught these two._ ” The woman shook herself from her stupor and dragged her daughter out the door. Grimly, the old man pointed the rifle at Rec’s chest. “ _Thank you, sir. I don’t care what they do to me but I couldn’t bear to see my girls come to harm. You’re very brave._ ”

“ _Of course I am,_ ” Rec replied, sitting a little straighter. He pulled a plane out of an impossible spin, he saved his life and the life of his co-pilot, and he would be the brave soldier befitting of his breeding. _Keep calm and carry on_ , he told himself. Then he realized that he was mixing British propaganda with a Prussian bloodline, that it was an American Air Corps tune that got him through the tailspin, and all that bravado drained away when he realized that he didn’t belong anywhere anymore.

The next hour was a blur. The Gestapo came, the family did a terrible acting job but the patrolmen were too pleased over their catch to notice, the kid stayed silent. Pistols replaced the rifle and shotgun trained on the fliers’ chests and less-than-gentle hands yanked dog tags out into the light. Rec had felt a profound sense of loss when he changed his name to match his new life but he was well over it when the terrifying man in black turned over punched metal and found a decidedly un-German name. The two of them were shoved out of the house and into the back of a truck.

One of the guards barked a question at them, in German. Though Rec was a mess he could still hold onto basic survival. There was only one thing he had to give them.

“Clark, William. Major. Serial num—“

“ _Move!_ ”  
Once they were settled in the truck, Rec buried his head in his hands. Name, rank, serial number. He tried to decide which was worse, the fact that his new name still felt so strange in his mouth, or the fact that his old name seemed odd even in his own head. He repeated it wordlessly, over and over, as though trying to remember someone he knew years ago. In a way, he was.

_Klink, Wilhelm. Oberst. Klink, Wilhelm. Oberst. Klink, Wilhelm. Oberst._


	2. Welcome Home, Soldier

While not a tall man Wilhelm Klink was by no means short and while he was a thin man he wasn’t quite skinny. His ability to pick clothes to flatter his figure was middling at best but he had spent most of his adult life in one army or another and the cut of a pressed uniform suited his form. The shapeless flight suit flattered no one but it did lend some bulk to his waist and limbs. He did not possess the sort of face that an artist would beg the honor of painting him but his hawkish nose and the line of his jaw were fine enough in a German sort of way. The weakened vision in his left side left him with a lopsided squint without correction and a lopsided squint with correction but his eyes were a blue which could be warm or piercing depending on his expression. The majority of his hair had sadly departed years before but his uniform cap covered it nicely and his temples had grayed in a distinguished way. He had a tendency to bluster and ramble but while he tended to speak at length about nothing he was well spoken about nothing and even had some skill with a snappy comeback. He was a coward in most cases but on the occasions that he had no choice but to do what needed to be done he could manage nerves of steel. He could be easily led astray by way of his flattery but he had genuine skill with language and accounting. For the most part he annoyed people with his vanity and his groveling ways but the people whom he did charm found him quite charming indeed. In the proper light and mood and when he drew himself to his full height he might not have made the most imposing figure of his time but his merits were sufficient enough for the image of an officer of good breeding.

Sitting in the back of a lurching truck traveling the dark, winding backroads of his home country with two guards who would shoot him as a traitor and a co-pilot who would strangle him as an enemy... well, this downed flier and defector was not at his best and his apparent merits were dwindling fast. He hunched around himself which his shoulders up and head down so that he appeared almost to be without a neck, his monocle had been dislodged in the crash and his eyes watered from the reeking petrol staining his jumpsuit leg, his abused ribs seemed to creak with every shallow breath and the resulting grimace etched deeper lines into his face, and soot and dirt streaked his face and clothes.

Not exactly the image of a proud Prussian officer of good breeding.

Rec glumly glanced across the truck to where his barely-pubescent co-pilot was shivering. The one cloud had argued rain and the other had argued sleet and in the end they decided to compromise and do both—even after his long absence Rec was used to the feel of the cold in his bones but the kid was from Arizona. The kid, whose name Rec still couldn’t remember, looked about as old as Rec felt.

And it _was_ ‘Rec’. On about the twentieth repeat Rec realized how stupid it was to silently chant his own birth name. At the time he’d picked his new name he’d thought himself rather clever. ‘Wilhelm’ to ‘William’ was obvious enough but he felt that ‘Clark’ was a stroke of genius. What other English sounding name came closer to sounding like ‘Klink’? Rec had been sorely tempted to spell it ‘Klark’ but in the end decided that he’d rather not carry on constantly spelling his name for people. Silver linings to every dark cloud and all that... but the point was, hunched down and miserable at the hands of his old countrymen, he couldn’t sit there and repeat his own old name lest he get in the habit of it and let it slip during interrogation, and even the new name was dangerous because it was so much like the last one. ‘Rec’ was short for recovery and sounded like wreck and it was an insult if there ever was one but then again so were half the call signs in any army. And Rec had the benefit of sounding nothing like Wilhelm, William, Klink, or Clark. It might be an insult, but it was the safest haven he had.

The transit camp wasn’t too terrible aside from being damp, cold, and full of fleas. Rec wondered if all the fleas crawling on them would help keep them warm. He shared this thought with his co-pilot—Elliott, the kid’s name was Sergent Jake Elliott—who then broke into a harsh, barking laugh that ended on something close to a sob. The kid wasn’t taking imprisonment very well. He’d been livid with Rec in the farmhouse and once they’d gotten out to the road Jake decided to take his fate into his own hands. He didn’t get twenty feet before the guards started shooting. Rec didn’t know if they were lousy shots or if they were intentionally trying to miss but the kid didn’t catch any bullets. He did hit the ground hard when he stumbled in fear. Of course, the bruise he got from the dirt was nothing compared to the split lip, swollen eye, and the punch to his already abused stomach which ended with him being sick all over the grass. After that Jake sat quietly and didn’t make any more trouble. Rec was so terrified he looped back around to numbly calm—if the Germans found out that he spoke the language then they might take a closer look and realize who he was. But the guards kept talking in front of Rec so Jake must have kept it to himself. The first time the two of them were in the same room after being separated for interrogation Rec managed to claw his way out of terror enough to feel a smudge of pride for the kid. He told Jake as much, then made the crack about the fleas, then felt sorry for the poor thing with the purpling eye and—

‘If the Germans found out.’

‘The Germans’.

Rec bit back a broken sob of his own. He was a stranger in his own country, he’d never even been to the country he’d pledged his new life to, he was a prisoner of his own people, _they weren’t even his people anymore_ —

He gave up on stifling his impending breakdown and just let it happen.

They were only in the transit camp for barely a day. While the whole point of a transit camp was to sort POWs and send them on their way, Rec got the idea that it generally took longer than twenty-seven hours to move new prisoners through. Somewhere during his interrogation an explosion shook the compound and as the dust fell Rec made a spirited attempt to hide under the table in spite of being handcuffed to a heavy metal chair. But as the dust from the first explosion settled there was no second shell. The colonel in charge of interrogation had been enjoying himself with insulting the petty American major before him while Rec silently seethed over the rank he lost when he defected, but after it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a second shell the colonel abruptly switched from English to his native tongue and started cursing saboteurs with the sort of fire and color indicative of a rough, common background and a lot of time spent either walking or assigning march detail. Rec gathered what few wits he had left and innocently asked if the bombers had passed them. The colonel swore some more, mostly in German but there were a few butchered English oaths peppered here and there, and then ordered the guards to take all prisoners back to their cells. Not long after Jake, Rec, and three other men were loaded into the back of a truck and taken to their new home and cage.

Rec mused that the unrest in Germany extended beyond a few farmers being willing to help downed enemy fliers escape capture. Even if the explosion had been the work of Allied agents there’s no way they’d be able to pull something like that off so deep in Germany without the help of the locals. The people were not as happy with Hitler’s rule as the propaganda would claim. Rec felt vindicated in his choice to flee and felt a little less terrible for dropping bombs on his homeland.

Stalag 13, it was called. There were a few camps named Stalag 13 and each had a suffix to tell them apart. Stalag 13, the one that Rec and the other four fliers were heading to, had a suffix as well but it seemed as though it was never used. Of all the Stalag 13s this was the one with the honor of simply being known as ‘Stalag 13’ because it was the only POW camp in all of Germany which could boast that it had never had a successful escape. Rec and the other new prisoners heard all about it, first in broken English from one of the guards in the truck and then again in complete sentences from the commandant of the camp. Heinrich Werner, proud Colonel of the Third Reich. There had been attempts, foolish attempts, but they had all ended in failure. The commandant strongly suggested that the newcomers learn from the failure of the fools who had failed before.

Rec seethed even through his quaking terror. His new jailer had repeated the words ‘fool’ and ‘fail’ in all their varieties about a dozen times each in the course of three minutes. If Rec were to make the same speech about the futility of escape attempts he wouldn’t repeat himself like that. Maybe begin and finish with a line about the no escape record, just to drive the point home, but there’d be variance inbetween. This Werner was making a fool of himself by parroting the word ‘fool’ so much. Rec was conflicted about his place in the world, that was oh so true, but as an officer and as a German this Colonel Werner should at least know the language a little more eloquently than _this_. The guards could get away with no or passing skills in the language but the commandant of the camp? It grated on Rec that a fellow German colonel was being so redundant.

But then again, Rec wasn’t German or a colonel anymore. He was an American major, born in England (to excuse the touch of the Queen’s English accent), and emigrated to the mishmash of culture that is New York City as a child (to excuse not growing out of the accent). Rec had always been fascinated by America and had always wanted to go there. One of the perks of betraying his homeland was that, after the war, he’d be living in the land across the sea. Though he hadn’t yet stepped foot on the soil that Major William Clark hailed from, as Colonel Wilhelm Klink he’d studied the United States extensively and he was sure he could fool a clod of a German like this Werner. He was reasonably sure he could fool his fellow prisoners provided he kept to himself. Maybe he went a little funny in the crash and didn’t want company anymore, and the kid Elliott could vouch that Rec had never been particularly sociable to begin with. The kid Elliott had no idea about Rec’s past, either. His C.O. knew, naturally, and the X.O., and of course the men above them knew and Rec suspected that the captain he usually flew co-pilot to had been told, but none of the common soldiers had any idea. It had been part of Rec’s deal when he defected; the suspicion of his superiors was unavoidable but he didn’t think he could stand being surrounded by suspicious peers. He’d given up rank to get it and while he sometimes mourned the demotion Rec still felt it was worth it.

The lie that he was a loner would be hard to keep up in the P.O.W. camp, maybe even harder than it had been in the wing—while Rec enjoyed moments of solitude he was at the core of his being a social animal and he’d spent a lot of time terribly lonely—but as he took in the idiocy of the commandant Rec felt his confidence in himself swell and he was _sure_ that he could do this. He just had to keep his head down, scrape at the feet of a few guards and prisoners, and he’d be able to ride out the rest of the war without being taken out and shot.

Werner collected name, rank, and serial from each of the men and little else. One man mentioned a hurting, swollen arm which had not yet been looked at, one timidly corrected the spelling of his name, and Sergeant Elliott confirmed that flak caused his and Rec’s crash. That was all Werner got, but he didn’t press particularly hard. He didn’t seem all that concerned with the finer details of his prisoners so long as they didn’t escape. After all their information was taken down the five newcomers were released out into the yard. They were accompanied by two guards: one thin as a zipper and one fat as a house.

Rec saw the flighty stance Elliott was taking and the way the kid’s eyes kept darting for the fence and the trees beyond it. Rec decided that he didn’t go through all that effort keeping the dumb kid alive just to see all his hard work go to waste when Elliott made a mad break from the two guards with loaded rifles for a fence he couldn’t cut or scale. And in broad daylight! This is why Rec was proudly a coward. Bravery would get one killed.

“Sergent Elliott,” Rec leaned in conspiratorially and the kid startled out of his intense consideration of the barbed wire.

“What do you want, old man?” Elliott hissed back.

Rec fought off the instinctive glare at the offhanded insult about his age—he was in marvelous condition for a man of forty-nine, thank you—and schooled his features into an expression that would not look out of place on the face of a schoolboy who’d just put a tack on his teacher’s chair. “Take a look at our escorts,” _and the guns they carry_ , he did not say. “Do you think the thin one gave all his lard to the fat one to hold and then forgot to take it back?”

The kid smothered a chuckle, then looked at the two guards, then failed at smothering his chuckle. Then his eyes fixed on the barrels of the rifles and his chuckle had far less humor in it. Rec prided himself on a job well done in diverting Elliott from getting himself killed.

Rec’s internal celebration was cut short when the thin guard turned a confused, affronted eye in his direction and the fat guard turned a wary, offended eye in his direction. Oh, so they knew English.

“There will be no mon-key business in this camp, and no insulting the guard!” the fat one said firmly and with the over-enunciation of someone who is fluent in a foreign language but only just and was determined to pronounce what words he did know correctly. The guard, a sergeant, was already doing better than his own colonel who had mangled ‘vicious’ as in ‘vicious dogs’ so terribly that it had taken Rec a full thirty seconds to work out what the word was supposed to have been.

“Give him a break, Schultz,” called out a deep voice with a home-grown American accent.

There were no prisoners in the compound with the exception of one standing in the doorway of the low building directly facing the commandant’s office. A sign in clear, un-friendly letters denoted the building as Barracks 2. The man was standing with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, brown like his pants and his cap which was tilted back at a decidedly un-regulation angle. The five new prisoners were headed forward by Schultz and Skinny and as they got closer the man with the sore arm struggled to come to attention and salute properly in spite of his injury. Rec squinted—the glasses with one non-prescription lens had been lost in the crash and his one weak eye wasn’t doing him any favors—and realized that the man was a colonel. Rec was already confused as to what a major like himself was doing in what appeared to be an N.C.O. camp, but to see a _full colonel_ there? It was preposterous.

Not to be outdone by the man valiantly making his injury worse, Rec and the other three came to attention as well. The colonel took his hands out of his pockets and returned the salute and put them at ease before walking over to the group. He glanced at all of them but focused on the man who was at present wincing and rubbing his right arm.

“Colonel Robert Hogan, senior P.O.W. officer,” their new C.O. said distractedly. “Has anyone seen to that?”

The man with the sore arm shook his head. Hogan’s eyes slid over to the pretty colors decorating Elliott’s face and then over to Rec’s leg in remembrance of the slight limp he’d seen.

“All right, everyone who’s hurt report to Sergeant Wilson. He’s our medic and he’s in Barracks 8. Schultz, Langenscheidt, you’ll take them there, won’t you?”

“Im-pos-si-ble!” Schultz scolded. The skinny Corporal Langenscheidt let his sergeant do the talking. “The commandant wants us to put them into the barracks right away.”

“Well then, you should put them into the barracks right away,” Hogan earnestly agreed.

“That is cor-rect,” the behemoth said with a sharp nod.

“Barracks 8,” Hogan suggested with all the slick charm of a used car salesman.

“Barracks 8,” Shultz repeated.

“Where our medic is.”

“Where your—“ Shultz stopped dead and his expression shifted to intensely exasperated annoyance. So, Rec though, this happened often. “Colonel Hogan, this I cannot do.”

Hogan reached into his jacket and withdrew a small morsel wrapped in foil and red paper. Rec could practically _hear_ Schultz’s mouth water.

“That’s a shame,” Hogan said with nonchalance so sincere Rec almost believed it. “But I suppose it can’t be helped.” The colonel took his sweet time unwrapping the chocolate bar. “You know what’s also a shame? I think that Wilson got too close to the kennel and picked up some fleas.”

“German Shepherds do not have _fleas_ ,” Shultz said with reflexive nationalism. His eyes never left the slow progress of the leisurely reveal of creamy milk chocolate, riveted to the sight as though the candy was a pretty girl taking her clothes off.

“Really? Maybe Wilson got them from that Private Müller over in the motor pool.”

“Müller has fleas?” spoke up Langenscheidt. Rec decided that while the corporal knew English he didn’t know it well enough to decode sarcasm.

“I would not be surprised,” muttered Shultz, who Rec decided did know English well enough to decode sarcasm but didn’t care for Müller and had no qualms with a prisoner insulting the man’s hygiene.

“Well, wherever he got them from, Wilson has got them,” Hogan said with an air of finality. He had finally unwrapped enough of the bar to break off a little piece and he brought it to his mouth with very deliberate movements. Shultz gave a small whine of loss and longing. Langenscheidt looked intensely confused. Rec was as well. Given the routine way things seemed to be proceeding Rec was willing to believe that this Hogan was going to get them medical attention but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what fleas had to do with it.

After judiciously licking his fingers, Hogan looked back at Shultz. “Say, before you take these prisoners to their new homes—don’t worry, men, once you get used to squalor it’s quite comfortable—you’ll have to take them through delousing, am I right?”

Rec figured out the angle, and from the shifting of the other four prisoners it seemed that that they had as well. Sneaky one, this Hogan. Rec couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Ja,” Shultz responded, still distracted by the delicious morsel he was sadly not currently enjoying. It seemed the angle was not yet obtuse enough to penetrate his thick skull.

“And Wilson is going to need to be deloused too.”

“Ja, because of Müller’s fleas.”

“Right. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and put Wilson through with the new men?”

“Why would we throw stones at birds?” Langenscheidt wanted to know.

“It would be the most efficient use of your time, and you know how our beloved commandant loves efficiency.”

“Jaaaaa, you are right,” Shultz said, considering the proposal. He had a shrewd look and had come to the conclusion that he was going to do as Hogan asked, but unlike Langenscheidt who looked impatient as though he would rather skip the dance it seemed that Shultz required it. “That would be most efficient. We cannot have fleas in camp, after all.”

Hogan nodded in agreement with these wise words. “What’s the point of a delousing station if we don’t use it?”

“Should we put Private Müller into the station?” Langenscheidt made a valiant attempt to follow the conversation.

“German soldiers do not have fleas!” Schultz scolded. Then he turned to his corporal with an official air. “Langenscheidt, go to Barracks 8 and fetch Sergeant Wilson. Müller’s fleas must be making him itch terribly.”

“Oh, silly me, I’ve forgotten the rule against eating in the compound,” Hogan commented idly. “I guess you’ll have to confiscate this little snack from me.”

Shultz made a lunge for the chocolate and Hogan quickly broke off about a third and shoved it at a grateful Langenscheidt. Shultz looked gleeful as he passed the paper to Langenscheidt, keeping the foil for himself. They each wrapped their morsels and stowed them in a pocket for later consumption.

“Don’t worry, men, it’s not so bad here,” Hogan said as the guards were securing their precious bribes. “I’ll be talking to you in the mess.”

“Colonel Hogan, you are not supposed to be outside of the barracks,” Shultz suddenly remembered. Hogan held his hands up in surrender, winked at the new men, and went back into Barracks 2 peacefully. Langenscheidt split off to fetch the medic and Shultz marched the five newcomers to delousing.

Wilson was irritated but compliant when Langenscheidt brought him into delousing. As soon as he saw the five grubby, banged up men already there he stopped grumbling at the German corporal and immediately started looking his patients over. They started to explain about Private Müller’s fleas but Wilson just waved them off. Rec strongly suspected that Hogan pulled these kinds of stunts often. It had to be hard, looking out for his men, but it looked like he did it anyway. That was a good sign for the men.

As Rec scrubbed the harsh soap into what remained of his hair, he felt himself slid down from the mountain of barely managed panic he’d been sitting on. Maybe he’d be okay. Maybe he’d make it out alive after all.

**Author's Note:**

> *laughs maniacally*


End file.
